Other forms: confessions
A confession is an admission that you did something wrong. A full confession, sign a confession, make a confession.
The legal sense is the strongest and most specific: a suspect's statement admitting the offence, which in most systems must be given freely to be usable. The religious sense is a formal act — going to confession, hearing confession — and in Catholic practice it is a sacrament with rules of secrecy attached. The everyday sense is much lighter: I have a confession to make usually introduces something trivial. Note that confession of faith means a statement of what a church believes, which has nothing to do with wrongdoing at all.
1nounconfessionA statement admitting that you did something wrong.
“The confession was thrown out because of how it was obtained.”
synonyms: admission, acknowledgement
2nounchurchesIn some churches, the formal telling of sins to a priest.
“He had not been to confession in forty years.”
3nounadmissionAn admission of something mildly embarrassing.
“I have a confession to make about the last biscuit.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
confession is an admission.
Latin confiteri meant to acknowledge fully — con-, wholly, plus fateri, to admit. The same root gives profess and confess, and the sense of speaking something out loud, rather than merely believing it, is in the word from the start.
Latin
cōnfessiō — confession, acknowledgment, creed or avowal of one's faith
Old French
confession
Middle English
confessioun
English, today
confession
From Middle English confessioun, from Old French confession, from Latin cōnfessiō (“confession, acknowledgment, creed or avowal of one's faith”). Displaced native andetnes. a doublet of confessio. Morphologically confess + -ion. Sense 6 is a calque of 告白 (kokuhaku).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA